


Volte-Face

by archea2



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Frottage, M/M, Redemption, Soulmates, tragic irony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 10:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8010301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben is eleven, stroke-of-midnight eleven, when he turns his head and sees the boy in white.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It begins like this: when Ben Organa Solo is eleven, stroke-of-midnight eleven, he turns his head and sees a boy in white.

One moment he’s firegazing at the Falcon’s bay window, crammed with more lights than the sky owes Ben on his birthday – well, birthnight. But all for him, his mother laughs, carefree, loving that family jaunt Dad’s sprung on them. The Falcon sweeps an _epic_ half circle in the dream-blue night and Ben laughs out, swirled by too much space and bedtime a thing of last year, and he’s asking Dad about their course when –

Laughter sickens into shrieks. Night is smoke, is the staccato red of gunfire, and it shocks Ben’s eyes open, tips his head aside as he tries to dodge the sight – and there’s the boy. Covered in rigid whiteness, his face muffled by it, but there’s a boy living and breathing under it, a mortal boy stilling under Ben’s gaze. And nothing has prepared Ben for this; for the streaks of blood on the boy’s helmet, red on white, strangely aligned like the boy himself is a coded sign, a night sign; like the blood has singled him out for Ben’s eyes only.

It’s scary, the blood. But layered over Ben’s fear, just as a warm hand wrapped around a cold hand imposes its sharper sensitivity, is the discovery that he can _feel_ the face under the mask. Young, his cheeks round and his lips open, and Ben takes it in, heart-deep, a second before the entire scene fades to a merciful dark.

"…or punch it through to the Asterion Cluster, eh? Your mom and I did it all the time. Raced old Asterion to one of its green dawns, back in the – Ben-boy, you with me?"

But the pang stays. The pang, the panic. The boy’s phantom grief, carrying on in Ben even when he is in Mother’s arms and she is rocking him back and forth, tucking him into her grip. He struggles to tell her, because she is Mother and a senator, and he can smell the lullaby scent of her hair about him. But she shushes him three words in. "They're gone," she says, sharp-breathed. "They're all dead, and they’ll never come back for you."

"But..."

  
The boy's invisible face is begging for him, the troubled, bleeding boy.

"Kid. Only I get to _but_ your mom." Dad’s hand touches the exposed patch of his neck, cradled in her arms, and Ben starts. "Hey, hush. It’s all over, kid – we cracked that lot well and good. Down to the last rotten egg."

Dad chuckles, and the next sound Ben knows is his, ugly and loud, gagging on tears and only half boyish. It isn't long before solider voices take over, but long enough that it carves a bitter rut in Ben’s mind, never to be filled.

The jaunt is not a success.

 

* * *

 

The years come and go, always on temporary leave. Like Dad.

The vision stays.

It comes to Ben whether he’s twelve or twenty, or fifteen, his body excitable and slippery, never fitting him like the supple black glove on Uncle Luke’s hand. But the vision never changes. Year in, year out, it lets Ben slip easier into its low-light spectrum, until he puts on night vision like a glove, or, say, a visor, and can make out all the human shapes speaking in shrieked words. Then he turns his head and finds his boy. It only lasts a second, never long enough to as khis name or find out how hurt he is, but the second is filled with burning symmetry because just as Ben is looking at the boy, the boy is looking at him. As if the boy – the gentle, vulnerable boy – was facing an invisible terror and making it Ben’s business. 

The years are here and gone, and the boy’s face ages with them. Ben strikes eighteen, and Dad takes him to a sabbac joint (doubling as a holomate house, it turns out, and can we please never tell your mom), and the boy is a youngling, now; his face darker, his pulse hard and fast as it batters at Ben’s heart by proxy. Ben can feel how the boy’s fear taps into a strong proud beat of _this is not right_ , how the beat knocks at the doors of Ben’s heart until he flings them open and his own blood shakes with an outrage twice his size. _Not right, not right_ – 

"Ben… ? Ben, what are you – holy stars, _Ben_!"

– hands balled hard and white, lashed against his bed wall, and the wall stares down at him, empty and powerful, and Ben thinks of the wrong done to his boy, and –

"All fuel and no shut down, " Dad says later. "That’s a Solo for you! C’mon, Leia, it’s just a crack. At fifteen, I’d have blasted a pocket nova to get some action goin’. Why don’t you pull him out of the damn room and find him some kids of his age?"

Ben is eighteen when Mother pulls him out of the Coruscant Academy of Learning. Dad finds out on his next return and voices flare. Ben shuts his eyes. Suddenly, on the jolt of one, they’re in his head: his parents, facing off, arms crossed and flung out in turn, bobbing their heads to each other in the heat of speech. It’s feverish and beautiful and it’s sad, bruising sad, how each of them is caught in a ring of angry love; how they strain and bob and become a shadowy version of the motif on Mother’s golden hairpin, that she wears on Senate days: the Alderaan swans on their beautiful courting ritual.

"Oh yeah," Dad is saying. "Let’s tout self-government by making our son a dropout. Peachy."

"Han, I had no choice. Those questions he keeps asking –" 

"So…? _I_ ask questions! For one thing, whose idea it was to isolate Ben –"

"His class was taken to the Galactic Museum and all he wanted to know was who they were, these – _thugs_ , how old they were, what they were called... Then he asked to see the Sith Hall, and when he was denied – Han, the Master Curator wouldn’t even look me in the eye. All it takes is one rumour,… "

The voices swan-dive to whispers. Ben makes out "denial" and "not _your_ legacy" and even "the F-word" before Dad’s sharper "…take a card out of Luke’s datapad and tell Ben the truth about his family?" and her harsh, unsurrendered cry of 

" _I have orphaned him in my heart!_ "

When he opens his eyes to the glare of Coruscant’s night traffic, the speed lights and landing lights impacted on his window panes as they cross fire, Ben is gone.

 

* * *

 

He is nameless to himself, like the boy. He understands now: his boy has no story, because there is no one left to voice it for him. Who would remember a stormtrooper? The streets of Coruscant are lined with engraved slabs, mementoes to those who gave up their lives for the Alliance; on Heroes’ Day, his mother wraps herself in Alderaanian white, lights a small brazier in the Senate rotunda, and recites one hundred names in several languages to honour the fallen.

But the other dead are silenced, with history taking over where death left off. Silence, like space, closes in their wake. Their families won’t own them. The Republic keeps no record of them. Ben’s tutor shakes her wise, wrinkled head and peers at him from magnified eyes.

"Do not speak of evil, boy. Track it down, burn it to the bone, bury the ashes. What else is there is to do."

"Where are the ashes, then?"

 

* * *

 

Twenty, and he holds his hand out to the bearing wall of his room, palm open, until the wall shakes from top to bottom.

And suddenly there is a new voice in his head, as if the crack let it out from whatever it was the walls hid. _I know the way of ashes_ , the voice says, a second before the crack fills with night. _Trust me, and I will take you there_.

 

* * *

 

When he’s twenty-two, Luke Skywalker takes him to Doladran for three days. They walk the little paths scooped out by the winds in the lush green plains, and Luke talks to him. There is a lost boyhood about Luke, tangible when the wind ruffles faded blond hair and plays with a corner of Luke’s mouth. Luke loves the plains, says they’re old friends to a man who grew up in a horizontal landscape and entered his prime on green Endor, but you know that already, Ben, don’t you? Says the Force is like the wind, if you open your every pore to it, says he’s glad Ben is here, sharing the wind with them, and all the time the voice in his skull murmurs, _Ask about the dead_.

"Can the Force make you see the dead?" he cuts in, halting to peer at Luke. They are nothing alike. Luke’s face is stolid, fleshlier than it once was – grounded in Luke’s unconditional _yes_ to life in all of its bends and turns. His is too long, too pale: a face drawn from an anamorphic perspective, waiting for the mirror that will set it right again.

Once, he’d hoped the mirror would be Luke.

"The dead?" Luke, startled into blue-eyed sharpness. A beat, then the kind tones again. "Yes, Ben. It can. But what it manifests is not a dead self. It is the essence of their will, reaching out to yours to kindle a truth or a mission. Why are you asking me?"  

"Can – can the Force take you back in time to save them?"

"No." The soft-rugged gaze turns away, losing itself to the soft-rugged hills. "The past should be laid to rest. But… " Luke pauses, turned onto himself, his next words slow-timed. He seems to be speaking inward, sort of, as if his words were for himself more than Ben.

"…sometimes, when circumstances – when you need to keep the past for yourself, hide it in your heart, the Force will let you embrace it. Take its pain and hope into your veins, and make it make you wiser." 

"Uncle Luke… " Unfamiliar words, risen from a plane of being he thought was no longer there. But even as he calls, and softness gathers in the blue gaze, the voice beats on. _Ask him about Vader. Ask if the whole truth was said about Vader_. _Ask, ask, ask!_ _And then, watch_. 

He does, and the guilt on Luke’s face is a like a tide, growing larger and larger until Ben is driven into it, his vision dissolved and reshaped by a darkness that gleams, metal-like, filling his eyes and dropping on his narrow shoulders like a mantle. There is a man under the darkness, Luke’s heart reaching out to him in love and loss, and Ben catches at the familiar pulse ; but as he does, it’s as if his own pulse was being caught and monitored by another, stronger force. The darkness forms words, _purity_ and _order_ , which do and do not belong to Luke’s heart, and a host of images, bold, bright pictures of stormtroopers, alive, their helmets spotless, marching behind Vader. All of them accounted for, every face sheltered by the bone-white mask, their boy-ness safe and closeted behind the beautiful exoskeletons. All of them guided to a better place, a better time – until the messy, corrupt, squabbling reality shattered the dream...

…He is lying in Luke’s arms, both in a tree’s green shadow. Luke’s soft-lined face is bent over him, his voice a calm surface, never breaking out his worry.

"You blacked out a little, lad." 

"I’m fine." When he closes his eyes, the floaters crowd them, a pale counterfeit of that other, darker gleam. Luke is turning him so he will feel the wind on his face, unaware how numb he feels now there is only daylight.

"Ben, listen. Right now, you are feeling troubled. And lost. But one thing you are not is alone. Because… there are other young people, like you, struggling with the Force, and I want to be there for them. I want to gather them around me, help them become what they can be. Give them the peace and guidance they crave." 

"Like, what – some sort of order?" 

He can feel Luke hesitate. "Well, yes. Although that’s one word for it." 

"And you want me to be… one of your white-clad lads."

"If you put it that way." Luke is laughing now. He loosens the hug, abandons his weight to the tree. "I guess I was one, too, back in my prime. So, what do you say? Will you join in and help redeem the past?"

The light is at its peak, cradling the plains from above as they strike their evergreen perspective, every path made visible to his eyes. 

"Oh, I will," says Kylo Ren.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys. Work is being a plague, and it looks like we'll need an epilogue chapter. Stay tuned!
> 
> If the quoted parts in Hux's speech ring a bell, that's right: they were shamelessly ripped from Mussolini 1933 speech, before he invaded Ethiopia.

Phasma speaks beautifully. Phasma is their Human Performance Reviewer, not out of any interest for the human per se, but because she’s polished her voice to an exact shine. Perfect-pitched it, until each chromed vowel slips into the next from a mouth that almost doesn’t move.

"XC-1108 (Troop) Motion Order 6.90.11 as vouched by Command. Off. CO 1/3." She tilts her head to the left, the regulation nod when refering to General Hux. "Memoed to CO 1/2." A nod downward: CO 1/2 is Captain Phasma. Of CO 1/1 there is, as a rule, little to no mention – even when he attends debriefing, a slender black monolith. "All units successfully removed from supply locations and relabeled. Progress rate in current functional units totals 76% capability, casualties in training…" 

She’s bare-headed, her helmet laid down on the table before her, and the room is cold. The whole of Starkiller Base is cold, and yet there is no breath to see when Phasma speaks, as if the thermal oscillator at its core stole every wisp of warmth before it clouded up on her lips. And Kylo Ren doesn’t know why he’s thinking this, why the thought can’t be switched off like a deviant glitch, but lingers on even as the session ends and Hux glances down at him.

"Loitering, Ren? Don’t you have a jigsaw to complete?"

Hux’s lips, now pursed shut, say how much he hates that Kylo is and isn’t part of their triumvirate. Is neither this nor quite that, a living offence to Hux’s absolutist craving for identity. A mystic in the chain of rank, his voice and breath othered by the vibro-net strapped to his mouth. To Hux, he is no better than a self-made alien; and self-respecting Hux, a true sample of the First Species, makes his point clear by dropping his voice to a hollow wheeze: "Or do you request a few troopers for your grand exit?"

Strmtroopers. Hundreds of them on Starkiller, and Kylo Ren can remember a time long ago when the sight of them filled him with a hushed trembling joy. But now they are everywhere, until _where_ is them, coming and going in twos or twenties. Hux calls them _units_ , which is nonsense: there’s never one stormtrooper on his own. Kylo made sure of that long ago. 

Once, there was one – the one, coming to him across the wound of time, again and again, so he could put himself in Kylo’s custody. Once, his ghost boy, his helmet bloody and his heart palpable in the dark. But no longer. Not now, with the past atoned for and Leader Snoke knowing what’s best for his visions.

He adjusts the helmet before crossing into the main passage. It is a silent mask – other headgears are volubile, feeding their owners a neon chatter of data, but he has no need of this. The silence walks with him in the early morning twilight, white figures pausing as he sidles past, some recoiling a step or two. He lets his steps choose for him, as they do more and more these days, unless he is being called to the com room where Snoke lies in wait for him, his face both gigantic and shrivelled – sunk and rutted, and at first Kylo had marveled at it, Snoke as that wounded past made flesh and vision for him, and –

He flinches, his numb steps stopping him. He has reached a crook in some pathway or other, where two troopers are kneeling before an open pannel, one crisply intent on pulling out wires and plugs. But the other is half turning, his eyes raised on Kylo. And then, without a moment’s notice, Kylo’s throat opens on an onrush of breath – not the thin, gravelly exhale calibrated by his mask, but the real thing, wind-strong and implacable as it rides his heart’s blood all the way up to his lungs. One hand to his throat, he stumbles.

"Sir… ? Sir, what is it? Do you, uh, require assistance?"

His head swirled by pure oxygen, he falters. Wave after wave bring an onrush of sensations, each layered upon the next like the reds and blues of a console’s signals. 

There’s a hand at his arm, not quite clasping, shivering. Whoever he is, the stormtrooper is terrified. And from far away, the Force picks up the duller static of his co-worker’s _are you frak staring mad, you’re gonna get us all reprocessed, that’s Kylo Ren you’re_ … 

Then, the hand clasps him. Metal touches metal, strong as the unknown will. The stranger’s empathy, cornering him from every side as it battles down the stranger’s fear. Again, and against every odd, every rule in his iron-in-iron existence, the stormtrooper does the unthinkable: he breaks into speech. "Sir, are you all right?"

 

* * *

 

All it takes s is one mind pulse. He freezes a timeline, theirs, and blanks out the incident until they’re back to white shapes, bent noiselessly to their chore.

But he remembers.

A week later he is still remembering, standing by Phasma’s side while the two of them watch Hux’s blue-eyed, clean-scrubbed face whip itself into a passion of rhetorics. Hux waxes Huxical, punches every superlative along his move from the _perfect, absolute, unalterable_ tie between the galaxy and the First Order to warning his troops against _the puerile illusion of thinking differently,_ and Kylo’s visored eyes take in the trrops. Row upon row of breastplates, unimpeachably white and aligned for his eyes to ricochet from one form to the next until the last but one in the fifth row, which is when the form pivots and _looks back at him_.

Only a second or two, before the man re-rights himself. But to Kylo, it feels like the entire field of molecule enveloping him had been altered, made golden and painful, a devastating ripple of sadjoy as if the Force was sickening in him. He feels Phasma shift at his side; knows, without a doubt, that she has seen it too – that chink in the hard blank line.

"Who is he?" he asks her later.

"Which unit?" His slip of tongue goes unmentioned. "That would be FN-2187. He has shown signs of dysfunctioning twice already." A pause. "Initiatives. In his last simulated mission, he went back for a jeopardized unit, impairing the corps’ efficiency." Pause. "On every other count, a first-class recruit. But, as I say – dysfunctional."

Years ago, before Kylo was newborn, he knew a problem child in a long line of functional heroes. And now her words, bounding back against the crypt of his skull, raise echoes: an only room, a woman, bare-faced, pleading, her love walling the child out. Or was it her disappointment? He cannot tell. It’s been years since he orphaned her in his heart. 

"Recondition the unit," he tells Phasma, not waiting for her nod before he strides out.

 

* * *

 

For a while, he is in peace.

His world gathers itself around him, like the black folds when they obscure his too-slim hips, his narrow shoulders. When he calls upon the Force, it darkles back to him and lets him probe the very heart of the galaxy: the stubborn give-and-clench of every star, sun, system, until he is close, close! to the Jedi Skylwaker’s hideout. Food and sleep slip by him, his fever rising with each black systole as he roams the dial-lit corridors. They always seem to double back and swallow their own beginnings, and Kylo’s feet drag him around until he is ready to collapse, the visions hard upon him.

"The old man," he tells Hux, whose nostrils flare up at the words. Hux doesn’t like _old_ , has groomed himself into the eternal pink of youth. "Once he looked for the lost Temple, but now he _is_ the Temple – Lor San Tekka, and I shall find him. Prepare your troops."

"Prepared," Hux counters, one arm flung before him. The primary bay, which they overlook, is crowded with tight formations of stormtroopers pouring in and out of TIE-fighters while a deck officer times them. Kylo leans over the railing to browse the massed, fast surge…

…. surging through the cracks in him, even though his helmet is intact, screwed to the base of his neck, and then – and then, he is mobbed with pictures.

 _His mother_ ’ _s tangled tress, hanging low for Dad to dip his head and catch it between his palms and his lips, all the sun and a wink in his eyes_.

The pictures – are the cracks.

 _Chewie growling his soft, dissonant hum over the Falcon’s rumble, until the hum and the rumble are one, rocking him into sleep._

_Uncle Luke’s soft-hearted eyes, their tears an open-hearted plea across a plain clotted with blood._

_The hot riotous air of a sabbac joint, a potluck of drinks and dice and Dad’s raffish whoop by his side, and it’s coarse, humid with sweat and sticky music, but it’s alive too, somehow, all the unruly clients make the live be._

_Green grass, green trees, the green fuse of the Force everywhere he looks._

His lightsaber is up before he knows it, cutting red rainbows on his left and right as he tries to move through the pictures. People make an emptiness before him, and the blade takes his feet to it, its glow a match to the aching glow. He doesn’t know that he’s been screaming until he is in his quarters and his throat feels skinned. But even then, even inside, the pictures rush him. And he has no idea why, the glow a sob, fogging his eyes, the red gleam shutting out every particle of space as he darts it blindly. 

"Please, sir. "

When he opens his eyes, the stormtrooper – unit - man is here.

And he…

The red gleam drops sharply to silence.

The stormtrooper is taking off his regulation helmet. It’s no easy matter: there’s effort in it, and sweat, glistening on the dark-brown cheeks when the face is revealed at last. The young man’s lips are open, his breath the only sound as he stands there, suddenly manifest as nobody else ever could be, the light falling on the generous symmetry of his face. Naked, defenceless, and Kylo can’t take his eyes off it.

"Please, sir." The young man is trembling. "It’s curfew, I know, but I had to see you. Just, I… I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. It’s when I look at you, sir, every time. I just." Another step into the room and Kylo, enrapt, can see the plump jut of his lips as they speak, how his boyhood still clings to the curve of his chin and the soft-rough attack of his words.

"There’s a map, " Kylo says. His voice comes out a twisted boom, but he pushes it through the criss-cross of meshes. He has no idea why this is who he is now, what the face is compelling him to be. "It has one missing piece. If I can make it complete – if I find that last, lost fragment... "

The man nods with unexpected confidence. "Uh-uh," he says, young-voiced, nervous. "Make it function. Like, they say if I follow every direction, I will. Be whole again."

Kylo reaches out, takes his right hand to the face. Up, up the young man’s throat, still half buried in the white armor. Up the path of flesh and sweat.

"But I’m not the map," the young man whispers. He closes his eyes and turns to lean a little into the unarmed hand. "I’m the lost piece. I think. And I’m a good fighter, sir, but then I see you, and it’s all I can think of – you, and how. How I’m the odd piece out. Sir, I swear, I _will_ train harder…" 

The door ushers in a knock, a woman’s voice. "Sir?" Her glazed tones show a tinge of impatience. "General Hux on the intercom. Are you – is there anyone with you?" 

FB-2187 is no longer a face when he turns back. Kylo Ren looks at the white shape, then goes and opens the door. 

"News, sir," Phasma says, nodless, which is as close to excited as Phasma ever gets. "From one of our insiders. The Resistance have a lead, and they’re going to act on it."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks to the wonderful readers who followed, kudosed and commented upon this fic so far!
> 
> I don't own the Simulation Room: it features in the pre-TFA novel, _Before the Awakening_.

"Tonight." Hux’s intel boils down to the word as he parades it, or rather the intel parades Hux, proud and loud, on the comlink. "They’re sending one of their pilots out tonight. Typical _Solo_ tactics. " A pause, so Hux can savour his little jab. "No, I don’t know who – no more than you do, Ren. Who cares about who. We’ll be ready and tailing that starscrewer the moment he takes off."

Kylo Ren exhales once, gearing his voice. It comes out true to self: cracked, somber, unhurried. His breath not quickening, giving his heart the lie. "Then you’d better get back and prepare to deploy. I’ve left word with one of your men to – ."

"FN-2187."

This is the first time he’s heard Phasma talk out of turn. His hidden eyes meet hers. "Yes, " he says. The next words are spoken across a blur of guilt, and with the guilt comes something else, a far, far away memory and a throb of understanding. Luke, lying to him about Vader. Luke’s face, made tender by his own betrayal. "In fact, I commend you. The unit is no longer a weak link, as I took time and some pains to ascertain."

Phasma doesn’t answer at once. "He’s one of us? Is that what you’re saying, sir?"

On the tick of that lie, another falls. There is no _us_. Not any longer, not when the young man’s face is stamped on the inside of his mask, the ghost of his breath secretly warming Kylo’s cheeks and lips. "You heard me, Captain."

But all she does is stand, while Hux’s peeved "then let him be deployed and done with!" crackles up. He sour, she silver, and she’s the one to reckon with, Kylo knows. He glimpses himself in the curved surface of her breastplate, dwarfed to a splash of black, and thinks with laser-pure intuition : _she has her eye on us_. He may be safe, because Kylo Ren being torn and sundered and not quite himself at the worst of times is par for the war. But for a FN unit? The readout is clear. Be one thing, or be done with.

And Captain Phasma, keeper extraordinaire of casualty rates, has her eye on him.

 

* * *

 

Has, quite literally, her eye on him when Kylo finds her again.

He’s never paid much notice to the Simulation Room before. It comes with the territory – hers, forged in that chaste silver wedding with authority that makes even the burliest stormtrooper freeze and say "Yes, Cap’n" at a glance. Phasma is no mother to her troops, but the Room is the next best thing to a womb: a death nursery, where trainees are fed shadows and taught to play the game, to run and shoot and scheme and kill so the Order will see another day. Kylo never gave it another thought; but now, with the young man’s absence so vivid it makes his eyelids twitch in longing, he wonders.

_Sir, I swear, I will train harder…_

"Where is Captain Phasma?" he asks the first moving target in his sight. The man mumbles, and Kylo’s heart bangs viciously at the words. The observation window is just above the Room, a superior vantage point not only into the shadow theatre, but the human player as well. Of course she would be there.

And he, his young man, down below. Walled in that room, made to ape one of her death scripts at his most vulnerable hour, which is _not right_ , the sum of Kylo tells him.

He steps right between the glass and her. Bright-eyed and feverish, more divided than he’s ever been, the glow almost suffocating. Ghosts leap at his brains: the wreckage of stories smuggled deep down him by his father when he was too young to resist. _And then your uncle walked bang into ol’Sluggy’s lair, and he said_ …

"There is nothing left to see," he says as the Force prods the hard-wired tapestry of her brain, every thread picked and bared down to the steel filament of discipline. … _still wish I’d had my eyes back then. They_ _tricked him like a day-old worm, Luke and your mom, so they could get me out hale and safe_. "The unit has completed the objective to your entire satisfaction. You will leave and see to other duties."

The Force plays the wire like a chord, its note high and alienating. Kylo lets it sing.

… _in your blood, too, kid. Ain’t no winter will keep a Solo out of the game, not ever. What? Just telling him a bedtime story, Your Motherliness. Give us a good-night kiss?_

 

* * *

 

The Room, when Kylo enters it, is still filled with smoke. And civilians. Too many of them, men and women, old and young, stood against the anonymous ruins, and – on the count of one nightmare pulse – making him eleven again.

Then he sees how they keep silent, simply flicker in and out of the scene, and he starts. This is not the past. There were colours, then – reds and yellows, not the cheap greys of holoprops, and there was the orange patch of – yes, it’s coming back to him, now – the dark-haired man being walked past him. This is not it. This is not a child’s vision. Let him turn his head _now_ , and…

"Sir," the young man says. Human-faced again, his helmet flung down on the sterile floor next to him, so Kylo can see his eyes fill with a baffled, beautiful hope. It trembles there, on the scales of his eyes, and then it flows over, burning a path down the slope of his cheeks. So warm. So corrosive. He’d forgotten the feel of it, how it swelled part of his chest and tipped itself into the breach of his lips, leaving its hot salt all over his mouth and chin, Vader’s helmet suddenly fogged out.

"Sir… sir, wait, let me," and Kylo feels the closeness of hands, struggling along his. Suddenly there’s air on his face and the young man’s _oh_ across his own tears. They stand before each other, the only people among the shadows, and Kylo thinks _this room is false, these people are simulacra, how can he not know?_ "It’s not real," he says and half-steps, half-falls before him. "Nothing’s real here," he adds even as they both kneel down, the young man’s hands covering his.

"You are real," the rough-sweet voice tells him, and when Kylo looks again, his hands are bare, the black gloves pulled off and tossed between them. His entire face feels raw and younger than its age, stripped to the bone, but when the dark-brown hand reaches shyly out, Kylo leans into it. "This is real, sir."

There is still fake smoke around them, eddying around the fake blaster-shots: he should have ordered Phasma to initiate the safety command. But they are touching each other now, and there’s a strange sense that, unlike as they are, their faces are a match, each the other’s true mirror. Their mouths are meeting, closed-lipped kisses dropped haphazardly on flesh, breath, metal; the generous face lit up from the inside and a will which is the true brand of purity, Kylo sees now, because it’s one-of-its-kind, not Hux’s prescribed ignorance.

"I can’t – no, I _won’t_ shoot them," the young man says, unclipping the hard planes over his chest and arms. He pushes his mouth up to Kylo’s cheek and sucks at a tear. "I can’t be who they say I am."

"I never wanted..." Both thin-clad now, each frantic, begging the other down to the floor and Kylo’s cloak spread under their knees. He pulls the boy – man – into his arms, lets his shock of hair fall between their faces to block the red view out there. "There was a boy, years ago, and I couldn’t save him, and all I wanted… all I want is to keep you from the blood, I _killed_ for that, I…"

"I’ll have to kill," the man pants, burying his face against Kylo’s neck. It’s a breakneck race between too many pulses, and Kylo can only close his eyes, too, chase the strong pure beat shared between their groins. "If I don’t shoot on their mark, then I’ll have to go against them, there’s no third way. There’s blood for me, but, ah, _ah_ , if I can have this…" Arms rising, his, the young man’s, pressing their faces together as they arch and thrust into the last thin layer of bodysuits.

"Sir, sir…" The young man is babbling, open-mouthed against his chin. And the heartbeat is all over Kylo’s body, straining him to that mouth, that call. There is life everywhere, in the slough of veins and the drum of hearts, drumming out the blasts, in every pore brilliant with sweat and pleasure, as they rock against each other in violent epiphany. " _Sir_! "

But there’s no call back, because there’s no name to be called, low and urgent and pacified, only that glazed tag they’ve both come to loathe. They craddle each other’s heavy breaths, foreheads brushing, which is when the young man’s thought is thrust into his mind – impulsively: a gift, not a trophy. _They say 2187 and all I hear is, to own hate severs. I never asked to hate anyone. And I don’t want to be parted from you, sir, ever_.

 

* * *

 

Then, Snoke calls him and _ever_ is shattered.

"Leia Organa has made her choice," Snoke says, his gigantic mouth filling the holosphere. "Your mother has chosen her best and brightest boy."

There is a pause, and he can sense Snoke’s invisible feelers probe him for envy or the smallest twinge of longing. Kylo stands still, lets two words fill his mind, coated in a dark sheen of sweat. _Parted, ever_.

Beside him, Hux shifts impatiently. "Supreme Leader, would that be… ? "

On Snoke’s slow blink, a new image gathers focus. The hologram shows a man in a flying jacket, his face cast in good-natured arrogance.

"Commander Poe Dameron. A true son of the Light, or so they say. Have you met him, Knight of Ren?"

The orange patch, the dark-haired man, prisoner, his face illuminated by the red staccato a second before a head was turned and a boy was seen. In that instant, when past and future slip into each other and he understands the vision was always a warning, Kylo is consumed. The understanding is so terrible it numbs him, makes him impenetrable even as it burns the very pit of his soul with the knowledge of what he’s done. In that split second he is taken apart and put back together: he is the boy who wept and the Jedi who made a holocaust, he is the orphan and the heir, the son and the traitor, the misguided agent, the victim culprit. And he waits for the lover, the final, odd-shaped fragment, to slide in place before all the pieces are sealed together, leaving him whole.

"Never in person," he answers Snoke.

 

* * *

 

He waits until Hux has locked himself in the command center, alone with his great hour. Then he directs his feet to the docking bay.

Every gesture is easy, as if it had been rehearsed for his sake by an infinite series of others. The Solo blood, he thinks as he boards his trusted shuttle, alone, Jakku’s coordinates etched on his visor. There is no more hesitation, only a great sense of _here_ and _now_ when he steps down into a battle scene as familiar as his own cardiac rhythm as it times his next step.

He turns his head, sees the white helmet crossed with three lines of blood.

"Walk behind me," he says. "Stay calm, and never stop."

They walk through and around the screams, crushing sand, never stopping, until the sounds of the ravage fade off, replaced with a string of high-pitched beeps as they approach the lone ship and its crew. Poe Dameron has two feet on the ground when Kylo Ren raises a hand, and Dameron’s weapon flies into his palm.

"Okay, okay." The pilot’s attempt at poise is shaky, his jaunty tones a mere notch above his droid’s cyberhysterics. "One for the black team. What now, you scoop my brains out? Feed me to your bodyguard?"

Kylo doesn’t address him at first. "Take your armor off," he tells the blind angle behind him.

"Man, that’s one _sick_ order you…"

The tip of the red blade darts to an inch before the man’s mouth. Dameron falls silent.

"Why haven’t you taken off?" The man doesn’t answer, and Kylo probes his scowl, uninterested in the thoughts below. "I see. I take it you have what you came here for? Yes." A hiss, a sword defected to a mere iron hilt. Kylo’s arm sweeps a half circle. "Can you fly an Upsilon-class shuttle? No, I guess –"

"I can fly anything!"

"Good." The word is spoken in his natural voice. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Kylo Ren takes off his cape. He turns to a young man, very much lost and shuddering in the dust raised off the dune by the night winds, and wraps the black cloak around him. He takes the naked hands, pushes them into the black gloves, still warm and supple from his touch. When he closes pliant fingers around the metal hilt, they stiffen and struggle.

"Go with him," Kylo says quietly. It’s not an order. "Take the prisoner back to my shuttle, no one will stop you. Go to the Resistance, they will take care of you." He lifts the black helmet, but the young man is shaking his head, resisting, a new stubborness awakened in him. Kylo bends his head and kisses him: a kiss of flesh and muscles, willing, hushing that soft breath and all the _I’m not leaving you_ under it.

"Now. Where you’ll be safe." He looks one last time into the young man’s eyes, and, because Kylo owes him a name: "Tell them it was Ben who sent you."

It takes every effort he’s ever made to numb the battlefield. He draws it all into his mind and it nearly shreds him apart, that field of multiforced energies honed to killing point. But he’s had two mentors in the ways of the Force, and he flashes back blindness into every direction, blurs their perception to the two figures – one clasping a lightsaber uncertainly, stumbling in a too-tall cape – crossing over to the V-shaped shadow. They board it, both of them, and Kylo waits until the shuttle has squeezed itself to a mote in space, its course unrecorded, to release his mental grip.

The exhaustion washes over him, but the Force sings on in his head like a wild tirade. Behind his eyelids, he sees a line of prisoners, their heads bowed, and Phasma giving an order; sees himself standing on the sand; standing in the hopeless dawn of Starkiller Base, facing Snoke; sees a man who he knows is Luke walk into his parents’ open arms; something healed, something understood; sees, and has no idea if this is another omen or only the last vision, a young man hold a scowling pilot under a red-hot blade and say, his voice absolutely resolved, _I need to get back to Jakku_.  

Ben turns his head away, smiling, and lets his steps take him to the long row of bare-faced prisoners.


End file.
